I am quite impressionable when it comes to speech.
I wasn’t in UK for a day and I found myself “copying” the London accents around me. I was embarassed-not because I have any deep affection for my Midwest nasality–but because I thought people would think I was being “fake” etc.
And then we went to France! I swear I was channeling Pepe Le Peu…I don’t speak French, but I spoke zee Anglais with a French accent… :rolleyes:
It’s very difficult to be around a group of people speaking one way and keep your normal accent. I, for one, believe that Madonna’s accent isn’t put on or fake - it’s just natural for someone to pick up the sounds they hear every day.
Heck, for me, living in Colorado for 10+ years, all it took was one long phone call from my mother to switch me back into “extra from ‘Fargo’” speak. I shudder to think of what I must sound like now, after 3 years back in da UP. I try not to end every sentence with “eh” and pronounce ‘th’ as ‘th’, not ‘d’, but I know that I don’t always succeed.
My late mother (born in Pennsylvania) had a ‘posh’ accent for the phone. Friends of mine would ask me what country she came from.
An American woman I used to work with lived in Britain for three years when she was in grade school. She had an ‘intermittant’ British accent – it kicked in on phone calls and in the presence of important superiors. When people would ask us if she was from Britain, we’d reply, “I think she flew over it once or twice”.
Tina Turner also seems to either have picked up, or be faking a British accent (I saw her on ‘60 Minutes’ a while ago – she’s apparently lived in Europe for quite a while).
Not that I have a fake accent of any kind, but my accent changes when I talk to my mother. I speak more in an Indian accent, since I intersperse it with a lot of Hindi. It could just be something like that.
I absolutely know about impressionable speech. When we’d visit my Cousin’s near Wichata it’d take me maybe 2 hours to catch thier twangless drawl. The upside is that when I learned German, I learned it with my teacher’s Bavarian accent, not an american accent…Then I went to Austria and converted it to Wiener dialekt.
Speaking of wich, Most of the Europeans I’ve met learned english with a British accent, and Oxford vocabulary. (lift vs. elevator, “in hospital” etc.). I’ve traveled enough that whenever I meet a non-native english speaker, I tend automatically to switch from american to an “international” vocabulary.
As for Americans sounding like the queen and 5 others (which 5, BTW ?):
The Brits should hear what they sound like faking an American accent.
Clue 1: While it is the second largest state, It’s fairly sparsly populated…we’re not all from Texas.
Clue 2: Even Texans don’t sound like that. If you’d stop saying “y’all” you’d sound Australian.
Clue 3: In Texas, “y’all” is second person singular. Second person plural would be “all y’all”
“you” is either junior’s girlfriend or yankee for y’all, depending on how y’all spelled it.
Did she smack her head on something? Maybe she has foreign accent syndrome !
You want fake accents, try TV Bostonian sometime. Yes, I have that accent, and no, Ted Kennedy was not my speech therapist. Ta pahk thah cah in Hahvahd Yahd wuh cahstyah thah bettah paht uv twuntee dahlahs. Maybe when I’m hammered, but not normally.
Madonna asking for a “fhaan”. (Clip plays on windows media player.) Its not so much that shes faking it, IMO, but that her whole public persona is a kind of performance.
So that’s what an English Valley Girl would sound like.
Very neutral accent here. I trained it out. I often get accused of not being a local when out in public, north of Boston.
Get me wicked hammahd though, and I’m leaving Rs all around town.
I have no discernible Southern accent. I get asked if I’m from around here, too.
OOOh, I sat next to an English Valley Girl in a class once. It was the weirdest thing ever.
Also–I worked in a call center for a while and tended to affect a southern accent. It was easier than speaking midwestern, and it seemed to make the people on the other line hate me less.
Bird Man has a lisp when talking to strangers. He talks just fine to me, friends, my parents, etc, but get him on stage or on the phone and he’s got this adorable little lisp!
Once sat next to a woman from Alabama. You didn’t have to listen long to know she was from the South, but when she would talk with her mother in Alabama, well - stand back ‘cause her mouth was suddenly drippin’ with grits…in other words, her normal conversation at work was her version of “high English” and to me it sounded like she just got off the Greyhound from Shinyfork, Alabama.
Perhaps the English accent girl has a new boyfriend with an English accent…foreign roommates/lovers often are the cause of people starting to pick up accents.
However, nothing is worse than to hear some honky trying to sound like a brother from the 'hood. Don’t know whether to laugh, or hit 'em up side the head.
My boyfriend has a terrible case of Sympathetic Accent. Three weeks in Sweden and Norway left him sounding extremely Scandinavian for a while. Annoyed the heck out of me and his mom.
I have a certain sympathetic accent. I suspect I’m typical of those brought up on the borders of Estuary English - I’ve got three parts upbringing, two parts local accent, and one part Eastenders.
I notice my telephone voice when I relax it - after the well-spoken ‘external call’ answer, realising it’s a colleague I know, and going '“Yerr-right?”
I definitely have Sympathetic Accent Syndrome (SAS). I unconsciously match the pattern and basic accent of whomever I’m speaking to, which I really have to watch because – as others have mentioned – I can easily come across as being a smartass, or as mocking the person(s) I’m talking with. Funnily enough, I don’t do it with UK accents as often/easily as I do with American accents … maybe because it’s harder to accurately pick up the UK accents (?). With those, I tend to change my vocabulary more than my accent.
I definitely have a phone voice, but it’s an unaccented, flat, “radio broadcaster” American accent (my North Yorkshire accent would never have been mistaken for posh ;)). I think it came about as the result of years of being on the radio (in college), in conjuction with years of being a lector (reader) at church, combined with a couple of years of voice lessons, followed by years of working as a secretary/receptionist after graduation. My “phone voice” is also my “presentation voice” at work.
I’d forgotten about my tendency to slip into a phone voice until a couple of months ago, when the guy I was seeing mentioned it. It’s not like my regular speaking voice is completely uncultured, I think it’s just that my speech pattern is more casual in person – and, I think that my voice’s pitch is somewhat lower on the phone.
And I’m perilously close to getting off-topic, so I’ll stop now. 
Well I’ve lived in Australia for about 10 of my 17 years. Other than that I’ve lived in South Africa, USA, Canada, England, Ireland, France and Italy.
Now I’ve only found this out about a year ago when my Australian boyfriend was in the room when I made two overseas phonecalls in a row, one to South Africa and the other to France. When I got off the phone, he asked ‘Why do your accents change?’ I had no idea what he was talking about so next time I made overseas calls, he taped them. And indeed, my accent changed. Huh? :eek:
Normally I have a pretty normal, average, Aussie accent with a bit of a South African/Irish (funny how they blend) kind of drawl thrown in there. And apparently my accent changes all the time dependign on what I’m saying and to who I’m saying it.
Huh?
i can’t talk to someone from the uk without picking it up inside of a few minutes. with 3 coworker with british accents it can get a bit wild. i start using brit. vocab. as well, not just accent. it takes a few minutes to de-brit.
books and pbs will set me off as well.
i pick up canadian cadence as well.
i’ve managed to stand strong against southern us accent. i just pick up the vocab. and just a few words get tweaked.
southerners get major kudos for solving the second person problem in english. y’all is just a fantastic pronoun! i use it no matter how i’m talking.
I was born and raised in West Virginia and have lived in the Baltimore/Washington area for almost twenty years.
People who meet me are generally surprised to learn my origins – they say I have no discernable accent. Which is probably true, because I tend to adapt to people’s speech conventions.
Around 10 years ago, my then girlfriend Laura (Russian-Jewish, Connecticut-born, city-bred) and I planned a trip back to West By God. I called a motel and asked if they had a vacancy on our scheduled date. We talked for a minute, and came to terms.
When I hung up, Laura was grinning at me.
Apparently, I had taken on a weird, hillbilly accent as soon as I picked up the phone.
“Hillbilly Hebrew!”, I sneered.
Back in the mid 1960s, the British Invasion, remember? My younger sisters, who were no more than 7 and 4 years old, respectively, affected “British” accents because of the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, Dave Clark, etc. Not that my little sisters’ accents were within miles of how British accents actually sound, but the point was we all knew they intended to talk British. Even though I’m a linguist, I’m still not sure how the brain pieces together such inept, wrong clues in speech and comes up with the intended conclusion.
No fake British accent has ever been more reviled than Dick Van Dyke’s ersatz “Cockney” in Mary Poppins (which was undoubtedly another major influence on my little sisters’ accents in the '60s). Everyone complains that Van Dyke wasn’t even close to getting it right. And yet, even though he got the sound all wrong, we can still hear it as an attempt at Cockney. A failed attempt, but a recognizable one just the same. Whence this elusive recognition?
People use accents to fit in. On a job I had once, I had to ride in the cab of a truck with an urban Italian-American guy raised in Cleveland, which is all the way North (next stop, Canada). About as un-Southern as you can get. And yet when he got on his citizen’s band (CB) radio to talk to other truckers, he affected a fake Southern redneck accent. His explanation: Nobody would understand you if you didn’t do that.